Clare Holmes works in a glassworks in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917, a port city that buzzes with wartime traffic. Living in the big town instead of on her parents’ farm has provoked a constant, simmering conflict with Clare’s controlling mother, Ada. But Clare has plans that Ada would never dream of. The young woman is saving up for her passage to France so that she can become a Red Cross nurse and be near her soldier fiancé, Leo.

However, when a ship blows up in the harbor, the blast destroys the glassworks and a swath of town, leaving many dead. The consequences for Clare are severe and cascading. Not only does she lose an eye, which means Ada grabs her and brings her home; Clare worries that Leo won’t want her anymore; and, worse, the post-traumatic stresses sap her desire to live. Her friends hold out hope that she’ll be able to return to the glassworks, but her job there involved checking the product for flaws, and the boss isn’t the only one who doubts she can manage that with only one eye. It’s a nice twist, the flaw-checker who feels — and is — damaged herself. And she becomes so aware of her imperfection that she can hardly get out of bed, let alone function.

But Clare is nothing if not independent-minded, and Watt has put her protagonist’s inner life on vivid display. Overcoming her disability literally means Clare has to develop another way to see the world in perspective; and when you read that she takes up drawing, the metaphor gains breadth. But her adaptation of course involves how she sees herself, and this is my favorite aspect of Dazzle Patterns. Where once Clare defined the future as being Leo’s wife, or, more immediately, staying out of Ada’s clutches and becoming a nurse, she now takes a larger view. It’s as if Clare’s loss and necessary compensation for it have let her grow in unforeseeable ways, to extend the metaphor even further.

Watt’s at her best when the narrative stays in Halifax. She portrays the home front and all its fears and prejudices with a sure hand, as well as the boarding house Clare lives in, the glassworks, and the horrific aftermath of the explosion. Here’s the destruction recounted through the eyes of Fred, a glassblower whom Clare later befriends:

Walking back to his rooming house Fred saw houses fallen in upon themselves, charred like abandoned bonfires, or burnt completely away, only the chimneys flooded with black puddles of ash and snow. Standing houses stared blank-eyed, all their windows gone. Telephone poles tilted. On the street, a breadbox, a school bag, a woman’s evening shoe, black patent with a pointed toe and a velvet bow. At the corner of Agricola and West Street, Fred brushed the snow off and righted an empty baby carriage.

But I think Fred’s less successful than Clare as a character. Watt makes him a prewar German immigrant, which allows her to evoke the jingoistic suspicion of an “enemy alien” who is actually a naturalized Canadian. I like the theme and how Watt plays it, but Fred’s a bit too good to be true, as if the chief victim of the narrative must be a paragon.

Leo’s more believable as a person, but what happens to him, less so. He’s a sapper, assisting the engineer officer who tunnels under German lines. Watt’s depiction of that rings true. But the narrative fudges on what the Western Front looks and feels like, and other details are simply inaccurate. Most critically—and I don’t want to reveal too much–Watt fails to consider what a civilian’s possession of a firearm in a war zone can mean, as in getting the entire village put up against a wall. Moreover, that entire setup seems designed to alter Leo in convenient ways, whereas leaving him as he was, though messier, would add depth and conflict.

Finally, I hope that what I read is an uncorrected proof — although it doesn’t say so — and that a proofreader will catch mistakes like the constant misspelling of Fred’s German name, and the typographical and grammatical errors that crop up.

Still, I enjoyed Dazzle Patterns. The story is compelling, Watt tells it with brio, and has provided a heroine worthy of your time and attention.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, in which this post appeared in shorter, different form.

It’s spring 1944, and Matthew Hammond, a colonel in British intelligence, has a torrid romance with the strikingly beautiful Madeleine Dirac, a French-Canadian woman he’s training for a very dangerous assignment. To prepare for the Allied invasion of France, rumored to be imminent, Madeleine will parachute into the country to help coordinate Resistance attacks on German transport and communications. Her survival chances are fifty-fifty, at best, so Matt can only hope that he’s taught the woman he loves the skills she’ll need to make it through.

Watson, who has written social and intellectual history and a couple novels, has taken a risk here. To tell this story, he’s abandoned both the nuts-and-bolts of Allied intelligence operations in France and its historical record, of which other fictional accounts include Simon Mawer’s Trapeze, Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers, and Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers. Such a departure can work, so long as the fiction feels compelling, fresh, authentic, and logical within itself. Depict deep characters whose struggles strike a chord, and it will matter less that the nuts and bolts don’t quite fit the historical template. Unfortunately, however, Madeleine’s War goes in the other direction, toward the ordinary, the predictable, the cliché.

Col. Hammond’s organization, SC2, is supposedly modeled after the Special Operations Executive, or SOE. But SC2 has peculiar ways of winning the war. Madeleine’s job interview consists of a night drop over the English countryside, which, as she soon learns, entails interrogation as a potential enemy agent, during which she’s stripped naked. (Never mind that as an untrained parachutist, she could have broken her neck, or that a soldier could have shot her, causing a security leak and a needless death.) The “mission” tells Matt all he wants to know, including her bra size, but does she resent being humiliated and turned into a sex object? No. During training in Scotland, Madeleine throws herself at him, finding further opportunities to remove her clothes. How, you may ask, does Matt have the time to train agents–only four at a crack, to boot–when he should be in London managing operations? Then again, how does anyone in SC2, let alone a senior officer, conduct an affair without getting court-martialed? Matt and Madeleine aren’t even discreet, taking a walk on a beach and a bicycle outing. Yet nobody raises an eyebrow, lending further evidence that this allegedly top-secret military operation is really a summer camp with occasional brisk exercise.

Consequently, the narrative must work overtime so that Matt and Madeleine can be together. The setup also allows Matt to narrate the rest of the novel from his office, denying the reader the chance to see Madeleine in action or even hear her own voice. It’s his war, not hers.

That pushes all the chips onto the romance, and it’s a bad bet. These people come straight out of a male fantasy in which the woman is gorgeous, undemanding, vivacious, and always willing, while (to reveal the predictable) the man has the chance to rescue her. That she’s something of a ninny–she admires Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s propaganda filmmaker, as “an opportunist”–doesn’t seem to matter.

Matt’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, himself. He constantly states the obvious and amazes himself and others with it, so that they come off no brighter than he is. But that’s partly because of the author’s narrative technique: In scene after scene, one character lectures another to advance the plot or reveal their past, often to say what they should both already know. And considering the security breaches that occur on virtually every page, if these people had actually led British intelligence, the Germans would have driven the Normandy invasion back into the Channel.

Which brings me to my final point, the novel’s trivial conception of espionage. To name only one example, when an ace agent of SC2 returns from two years in the field, Matt notices that he has a pock-marked face and a congenital stoop. It’s as if Matt has never seen him before–odd, if he trained the man–but it’s his reaction that matters here. The spymaster thinks, How brilliant; our agent is so obviously unathletic, unfit for military service, and that’s why the Germans thought him harmless.

But if the SOE had actually given this man a field assignment, he’d have posed an immediate risk to himself and others. An agent had to be fit, to conduct operations and stand a greater chance of escape, if necessary. His or her best–only–protection was to blend into the population. This fellow would have stuck out in any crowd, and the Gestapo would have spotted him right away. The word harmless wasn’t in their lexicon. They terrified a continent because they assumed that anyone could turn traitor, at any moment–and they’d be there when it happened.

That fear never shapes Madeleine’s War, never reaches the reader. I simply couldn’t connect with these shallow characters and their far-fetched actions and motives.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher, in return for an honest review.

“The automobile business,” muses Jack McColl, the engaging British protagonist of this excellent thriller, “was not what it had been even two years before. . . . Spying, on the other hand, seemed an occupation with a promising future.”

If nothing else, Jack is prescient, for the year is 1913, and the infant secret services of Britain and Germany are gearing up for a war of which most Europeans have no inkling. It will be a global war, he senses, and indeed, his first assignment is to track German warships that have put in at Tsingtau, a German colony in China with its requisite population of spies. Jack’s being watched more carefully than he knows.

But he enjoys a dash of danger. Further, he realizes that selling luxury automobiles, his main job, will soon go the way of the dodo, thanks to Henry Ford and his Model T. Jack wants–or thinks he wants–a full-time position with his espionage organization, vaguely connected to the British Admiralty. But he goes back and forth, because his work to protect the empire challenges his political and moral beliefs in the rights of the poor and disenfranchised.

Already, this feels like new ground: a would-be spy who reflects on the bodies that fall in his wake. He tries to reconcile what he’s seen and done with the more abstract threat from German militarism and its leaders’ disrespect for the rights of others, and sometimes, he comes up empty. Even better, Jack’s work conflicts with his passion for the exquisite Caitlin Hanley, an American journalist he meets in China; among other tasks, he’s assigned to investigate links between German agents and Irish separatists whom Caitlin’s family supports. Her combination of progressive politics, will to change the world, and career ambition have smitten him, but for once, this is a spy novel in which the hero worries that the woman of his dreams doesn’t love him. She likely won’t if she learns who he really is.

Then there’s the spy stuff, which Jack has to learn on the job. He’s a quick study, but his opponents sometimes outwit him, and he has several narrow escapes. His social gifts and ability to speak nine languages let him assume false identities with relative ease. But he also feels out of his depth, which makes him human, a refreshingly anti-James Bond. Like the prototypical spy, Jack trots the world, from China to San Francisco to New York and beyond, but Downing’s grasp of history keeps the travel suitably difficult and the connections unreliable.

A few critics have taken the author to task, saying that he should concentrate on Jack’s on-the-job training and damp down the history. Fie, say I, and not just because I’m a historian of that era and love that stuff. Jack and Caitlin read newspapers avidly because they care deeply about politics, also the hub of their respective professions. I never felt as if they were batting headlines back and forth to dump information on the reader or paint a backdrop.

As for historical accuracy, it’s impressive, especially considering the wealth of detail. The narrative does suggest that conscription existed in Britain then, which isn’t true (not until 1916), and Jack’s surveillance of a German agent in New York would have been hampered by having to crank his Model T to start the engine.

But these nits are worth mentioning only because of discussions I’ve seen recently in the blogosphere that even one petty detail got wrong can ruin a book. Really? There isn’t a historian writing today who doesn’t accept the chances of error, so why should novelists be held to a higher standard? Imagination trumps pedantry, any day.

Sorry for my digression. Read Jack of Spies. You won’t be disappointed.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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Damyanti Biswas is an author, blogger, animal-lover, spiritualist. Her work is represented by Ed Wilson from the Johnson & Alcock agency. When not pottering about with her plants or her aquariums, you can find her nose deep in a book, or baking up a storm.